


In Eagle

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-13
Updated: 2011-03-13
Packaged: 2017-10-16 22:15:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Serenity's crew is doing well with the "paranormal investigators" long con, until an unwelcome visitor shows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Eagle

**La Genie**  
"Cobb Investigations, Eagle Branch! We're hopeless but we help!" River said dolefully, flicking a hand through her short hair (now dark brown streaked with blonde).

"I think you're supposed to be more upbeat about it, and the slogan is…" Simon said.

"Joke!" River said. "Joke! What're you reading?"

"The Prophetic Books of La Genie," Simon said. He'd never thought of himself as vain, but he couldn't get past the annoyance of how awful his brush-cut, sandy hair looked. "Jesus, the crap that some people believe…."

"Now who needs to be more upbeat?" River said. "And yet oratio continued despite Horatio's ratio. Nymph in thy orisons be all my sins remembered. Want some more coffee?"

"River, you make **terrible** coffee."

"Brain the size of a planet, and they've got me making coffee. It's part of the genre, Simon—no one would believe a hard-boiled private eye who had **good** coffee in his depressingly shadowed office."

 **Galinee**  
"Practically providential that we broke down here," Mal said, a yawn cracking his jaw. He adjusted the pillow behind his head and tugged the blanket free. "Civilized enough so 'Nara can find some work, raw enough that they don't read the law enforcement bulletins too close."

"Nothin' providential about it, you don't believe in that anymore, and we ain't broke down yet. I don't like stayin' here," Jayne said. He thought that Mal could be a damn sexy man, and there was nothin' wrong with a good bounce, except that Mal always commenced to cuddling and yapping just when Jayne wanted to score some quality rack time.

"I took it as a kindness, all of you comin' back for me that time, but after that I lost my taste for stoppin' dead in the water," Mal said. "Best that we got that warnin' and had the time to lay up here on Galinee and have Kaylee and Wash take their sweet time gettin' her right and Zoe to take shotgun."

"We're too damn near the Core for it to be a good idea to hide out here, if we was to, anywhere," Jayne said.

"Yeah, but y'know what they got here? At least one real rich guy that I read about in 'Nara's "Planet and Moon" magazine. Real rich and real superstitious. That all points to one thing."

"We're gonna get our ass kicked again as per usual?"

Mal glared at him. "The long con. That man here is our ticket to the good life. Right off the bat, we can convince him that his enemies put some kinda hex on him, and we can take it away if he gives up a boatload of coin. And when we're in there exorcisin', there could be some stuff worth pickin' up. That's what Inara said." (Actually what Inara had said was, "That's splendid, Mal. Add to the Lassiter—perhaps soon you will be able to open your own Museum of Unsaleable Priceless Artifacts With No Provenance.")

 **Gain Eel**  
Jayne sort of didn't like being up for bid as Bachelor #4 at the charity auction (held at Gin Alee—the dive-bar ambience was all the rage that season). But he sort of liked it too. Kaylee was mostly at for the hors d'oeuvres—the assortment of sushi was magnificent—but Wash followed the bidding with fascination and managed to avoid rolling on the floor.

Anyway, Mal was right, and the publicity led to some new jobs working party security, and bodyguarding, and finding the occasional lost cat. The winning bidder at the auction was a divorce lawyer, and they were offered some bedroom snooping but virtuously turned it down.

Thing about bodyguarding was Jayne suspected half his clients didn't feel threatened, they just liked rough trade. So one way you looked at it, he got to bang some rich girls **and** take their money. Other way 'round though—the way he figured Mal would see it when the thing he had with Mal inevitably turned ugly—he was doing unlicensed what Inara did licensed. And you could twist that around too, about who got to insult who about Mal never gettin' the hots for anybody who humped purely for free.

 **I Lie, Nag**  
Simon and River put together a Cortex site that looked like it'd been there forever, with lots of clips about their past successes in interplanetary paranormal investigations. They'd been there for ten days and were beginning to get worried when the big fish, Eli Nage, got reeled in.

They played it so Mal played the dumb muscle, which meant he got to do most of the furniture-moving for the feng shui consultation at Nage's estate, which soon led to a full portfolio of supernatural spa services.

At first Simon wrote his own spells and prophecies, but then he just took dictation of what River felt like saying. And River, dabbed in phosphorescent paint, made a lovely fleeting spectre at seances.

Nage was not a dislikeable old guy, and he was lonely, so Simon spent a couple of evenings there post-fraud, drinking cognac and playing chess. Simon felt sorry as hell about ripping him off, but he half-consoled himself that at least it was better than robbing the man at gunpoint, and they weren't greedy enough to put even a dent in his fortune.

 **Age Line**  
Repairs proceeded slowly, but they didn't take forever. Relieved of her shipboard duties after about three weeks, Kaylee occasionally took a shift at the front desk of the office, spelling River at lunchtime.

She craned her neck: that Englia E the new client was driving was one beautiful piece of machine. Kaylee hoped that meant he could afford a power of private detection.

"Fill this out, please," Kaylee said, offering a New Client Questionnaire on a clipboard, reading upside down, "Mr. Gan," she finished. "Sure am sorry for your troubles, and have a seat there. I'll call our Doctor—our Doctor Dee in the Prophecies Department-- to have a look at that scroll for you." She pressed the button under the reception desk with her foot.

Simon came out of his small office, into the reception area. "You'd better go file that contract," he told Kaylee. "You know, in the room with the safe. And the door that locks." Kaylee couldn't figure out why Simon looked so sick—worse, really, than when Stitch Higgins let go of his shirt collar and he tumbled to the dirt of Canton. She ran to the strongroom and tried to raise Mal's pasukom; he was out on a house call from the special Two-For-One Exorcism coupon. .

"Hello, Father," Simon said, his hands hanging limply at his sides.

"Take those damn things out," Gabriel said. "You don't need your vision corrected in any literal sense."

Simon, gaping gratefully, bent forward to remove the dark-brown lenses and toss them ringingly into the wastepaper basket. He blinked. His eyes were blue once again, glowing like the top of an iris or the middle of a gas flame.

"'Thou boy of tears,'" Gabriel said contemptuously. "You always were a disappointment to me."

"Ninety-seventh percentile wasn't good enough for you?"

"You were fifth in your class. Four students outranked you. Including a girl."

"Well, so what? Half of everybody is—are—girls."

"An infinitesimal proportion of those who count in the world. However, I'm here to retrieve one who does."

"She's not here," Simon said. "Not on—not on this planet."

"Don't bother trying to lie," Gabriel said. "You need her to feed your sense of infantile omnipotence. Nap time is over now. I'm taking her back."

"We—will--never go back there. You don't know what they did to her."

"Of course I know, every schoolboy knows. And as for "we" going back there, the girl is the one who matters. You can go to the Devil or stay with this rabble of misdemeanants, just as you prefer. Just look at how you've let yourself go to see. That vulgar short-sleeved shirt. Did we teach you nothing? It's not even tucked in properly, it hangs like a maternity smock."

Simon looked down, rounded his shoulders, and stuck his hands in his pants pockets. "It's designed for…it serves a useful purpose. But it's not important. I'm sort of glad you're here. Father, they were hurting River. You'd see it, if you spent any time with her. The way she is now. Now that you're here, you have to help us."

"I told you before, you squandered your one chance. You have failed in the most important duty that civilization imposes on you. What kind of a man can you be, with no respect for your father?"

" **Nature** demands that a man protect his children. Your failure in something so critical excuses mine."

"You disgust me," Gabriel said. "The Alliance gave us a great deal. It's time for us to give something back, and not shirk the sacrifices."

"She's not your—your possession to sacrifice. Not your, not your pawn."

Simon heard the front door open. River moved noiselessly, you couldn't hear her feet but if you were attuned, you could hear the whisper of her skirts. Simon tried to tell her to go back out the door before Gabriel turned to face her, but telepathy, like street cops, tends to appear only when unwanted.

River had been planning to say "Look! I brought crullers!" but on the basis of the new information, she screamed instead.

"Her voice was ever gentle, soft and low—an excellent thing in a woman, " Gabriel said.

Simon thought that sometimes River didn't help the situation **at all**.

"River, he wants you to go back, but you don't have to. I won't let him make you do anything you don't want."

"Stop me? I'm strong and you're a pathetic weakling. River, it was very wrong of you to leave the Academy. But I suppose that it was his fault, that he took you away by force. Show me that you know what your duty is to the Alliance. What you owe."

"The cold men who cut me? They can get another sausage," River said.

And then, moving with a silent speed that looked like River's inheritance, Gabriel had an arm around River's waist, and a knife of her throat. "Your necropsy is nearly as valuable as your services," he said.

But evidently not every schoolboy knew the scope of the full Academy curriculum. "I’ll get Jayne," River said over her shoulder as she struck backward at his knee, twisted away and sprinted. "He gets paid for this sort of thing."

When she found him, he said, "Damn, River, can't a man even piss that rotten coffee o'yours without a brass band?"

"Not this time," River said.

Further debate ended when they heard the shot.

Jayne stuffed his dick back in his pants, and did up his belt and a button or two. River reached past him to flush the toilet and they ran back out of the tiny powder room under the stairs.

Gabriel stretched supine on the ground. But where Simon (reaching beneath his hideous shirt to the hip holster where he kept his .38) pumped a bullet into Gabriel's leg, instead of blood pouring out, there was an aurora borealis of blue light arcing up, and a titanium strut stuck out instead of white bone.

When Kaylee and Mal arrived (after River found Simon's medkit and gave him a damn Compazine shot so he'd stop vomiting into the potted palm) they helped Jayne hack apart the robot and strew its components in the town dump.

Inara had finished her appointments and was perfectly happy to dock the shuttle and head off with Serenity.

 **AI Liege**  
"Aw, **crap**!" one of the watchers at the Blue Sun Experimental lab said, pointing one of his azure-sheathed fingers at the screen that showed the output of the robot's camera chips. "Well, so much for the Unmanned Probe project."

"It was an expensive toy," his partner said. "So we can kiss our Christmas bonuses goodbye, too."

"We'll be lucky not to join the Ariel mission team after a frell-up like this. I mean, we had them pinned down on Galinee, and now about all we can say is that it's a good guess that they're someplace that isn't Galinee. Unless they were someplace else and they circled back."

 **In A Glee**  
Blue sparks crackled, seeking, until enough of them joined to run over an invisible wire. Head rolled, magnetized, onto its neck. A right arm crawled, finger over finger, to rejoin its torso. That was better—with a hand available, the Tambot could prospect more effectively for its left arm. With both arms stuck on, it was practically simple to hoist itself over to where there were legs. Which could be stood on.

"Well," it said happily. "Here I am."

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fusion—the Firefly version of the Angel Season 5 episode "Lineage." It was written for the Fireflyslash "Role Reversals" challenge.


End file.
